Chapter III: Ancestry of Shakespeare’s Roman Plays (2)

Jacques Amyot was born in October, 1513, in Melun, the little town on the Seine, some thirty miles to the south-east of Paris. His parents were very poor, but at any rate from his earliest years he was within the sweep of the dialect of the Île de France, and had no _patois_ to unlearn when he afterwards appeared as a literary man. Perhaps to this is due some of the purity and correctness which the most fastidious were afterwards to celebrate in his style. These influences would be confirmed when as a lad he proceeded to Paris to pursue his studies. His instructors in Greek were—first, Evagrius, in the college of Cardinal Lemoine, and afterwards, Thusan and Danès, who, at the instance of Budaeus, had just been appointed _lecteurs royaux_ in Ancient Philosophy and Literature. Stories are told of the privations that he endured in the pursuit of scholarship, how his mother sent him every week a loaf by the watermen of the Seine, how he read his books by the light of the fire, and the like; but similar circumstances are related of others, and, to quote Sainte Beuve, are in some sort “the legend of the heroic age of erudition.” It is better authenticated that he supported himself by becoming the domestic attendant of richer students till he graduated as Master of Arts at the age of nineteen. Then his position began to improve. He became tutor in important households, to the nephews of the Royal Reader, and to the children of the Royal Secretary. Through such patrons his ability and knowledge were made known to the King’s sister, Marguérite de Valois, the beneficent patroness of literature and learning. He had proceeded to Bourges, it is said, to study law, but by her influence was appointed to discharge the more congenial functions of Reader in the Greek and Latin Languages, and was soon promoted to the full professorship. The University of Bourges was at the time the youngest in France save that of Bordeaux, having been founded less than three-quarters of a century before in 1463, when the Renaissance was advancing from conquest to conquest in Italy, and when Medievalism was moribund even in France. The new institution would have few traditions to oppose to the new spirit, and there was scope for a missionary of the New Learning. For some ten or twelve years Amyot remained in his post, lecturing two hours daily, in the morning on Latin, in the afternoon on Greek. No doubt such instruction would be elementary in a way; but even so, it was a laborious life, for in those days the classical teacher had few of the facilities that his modern colleague enjoys. It was, however, a good preparation for Amyot’s peculiar mission, and he even found time to make his first experiments in the sphere that was to be his own. By 1546 he had completed a translation of the _Aethiopica_ of Heliodorus, the famous Greek romance that deals with the loves and adventures of Theagenes and Chariclea. Amyot afterwards, on the authority of a manuscript which he discovered in the Vatican, identified the author with a Bishop of Tricca who lived in the end of the fourth century, and of whom a late tradition asserted that when commanded by the provincial synod either to burn his youthful effusion or resign his bishopric, he chose the latter alternative. “Heliodorus,” says Montaigne, when discussing parental love, “ayma mieulx perdre la dignité, le proufit, la devotion d’une prelature si venerable, que de perdre sa fille, fille qui dure encores bien gentille, mais à l’aventure pourtant un peu curieusement et mollement goderonnee pour fille ecclesiastique et sacerdotale, et de trop amoureuse façon.”[94] In the case of the young French professor it had happier and opposite consequences, for it procured him from the king the Abbey of Bellozane. This gift, one of the last that Francis bestowed for the encouragement of letters, was partly earned, too, by a version of some of Plutarch’s _Lives_, which Amyot presented to his royal patron and had executed at his command.

[94] II. viii., _De l’affection des pères aux enfants_.

With an income secured Amyot was now in a position to free himself from the drudgery of class work, and follow his natural bent. In those days not all the printed editions of the classics were very satisfactory, and some works of the authors in whom he was most interested still existed only in manuscript or were known only by name. He set out for Italy in the hope of discovering the missing _Lives_ of Plutarch and of obtaining better texts than had hitherto been within his reach, and seems to have remained abroad for some years. For a moment he becomes a conspicuous figure in an uncongenial scene. In May, 1551, the Council of Trent had been reopened, but Charles delayed the transaction of business till the following September. The Italian prelates, impatient and indignant, were hoping for French help against the emperor, but instead of the French Bishops there came only a letter from the “French King addressed to ‘the Convention’ which he would not dignify with the name of a council. The King said he had not been consulted about their meeting. He regarded them as a private synod got up for their own purposes by the Pope and the Emperor and he would have nothing to do with them.”[95] It was Amyot who was commissioned with the delivery and communication of the ungracious message. Probably the selection of the simple Abbé was intended less as an honour to him than as an insult to the assemblage. At any rate it was no very important part that he had to play, but it was one which made him very uncomfortable. He writes: “Je filois le plus doux que je pouvois, me sentant si mal et assez pour me faire mettre en prison, si j’eusse un peu trop avant parle.” He was not even named in the letter, and had not so much as seen it before he was called to read it aloud, so that he complains he never saw a matter so badly managed, “si mal cousu,” but he delivered the contents with emphasis and elocution. “Je croy qu’il n’y eust personne en toute la compagnie qui en perdist un seul mot, s’il n’estoit bien sourd, de sorte que si ma commission ne gisoit qu’a présenter les lettres du roy, et à faire lecture de la proposition, je pense y avoir amplement satisfait.”

But his real interests lay elsewhere, and he brought back from Italy what would indemnify him for his troubles as envoy and please him more than the honour of such a charge. In his researches he had made some veritable finds, among them a new manuscript of Heliodorus, and Books XI. to XVII. of Diodorus Siculus’ _Bibliotheca Historica_, only the two last of which had hitherto been known at all. His treatment of this discovery is characteristic,[96] both of his classical enthusiasm and his limitations as a classical scholar. He did not, as the specialist of that and perhaps of any age would have done, edit and publish the original text, but contented himself with giving to the world a French translation. But the _Historic Library_ has neither the allurement of a Greek romance nor the edification of Plutarch’s _Lives_; and in this version, which for the rest is said to be poor, Amyot for once appealed to the popular interest in vain.

[95] Froude, _Council of Trent_, chap. xii.

[96] See M. de Job’s remarks in Petit de Julleville’s _Littérature Française_.

The Diodorus Siculus appeared in 1554, and in the same year Henry II. appointed Amyot preceptor to his two sons, the Dukes of Orleans and Anjou, who afterwards became respectively Charles IX. and Henry III. As his pupils were very young their tuition cannot have occupied a great deal of his time, and he was able to pursue his activity as translator. In 1559, besides a revised edition of _Theagenes and Chariclea_, there appeared anonymously a rendering, probably made at an earlier date, of the _Daphnis and Chloe_, a romance even more “curieusement et mollement goderonnee pour fille ecclesiastique et sacerdotale” than its companion. But it is with his own name and a dedication to the King that Amyot published almost at the same date his greatest work, the complete translation of Plutarch’s _Parallel Lives_. If his Heliodorus gave him his first step on the ladder of church preferment, his Plutarch was a stronger claim to higher promotion. Henry II., indeed, died before the end of the year, but the accession of Amyot’s elder pupil in 1560, after the short intercalary reign of Francis II., was propitious to his fortunes, for the new king, besides bestowing on him other substantial favours, almost immediately named him Grand Almoner of France.

Amyot was an indefatigable but deliberate worker. Fifteen years had elapsed between his first appearance as translator and the issue of his masterpiece. Thirteen more were to elapse before he had new material ready for the press. The interval in both cases was filled up with preparation, with learned labour, with the leisurely prosecution of his plan. A revised edition of the _Lives_ appeared in 1565 and a third in 1567, and all the time he was pushing on a version of Plutarch’s _Moralia_. Meanwhile in 1570 Charles gave him the bishopric of Auxerre; and without being required to disown the two literary daughters of his vivacious prime, “somewhat curiously and voluptuously frounced and of too amorous fashion” though they might be, he had yet to devote himself rather more seriously to his profession than he hitherto seems to have done. He set about it in his usual steady circumspect way. He composed sermons, first, it is said, writing them in Latin and then turning them into French; he attended faithfully to the administration of his diocese; he applied himself to the study of theological doctrine, and is said to have learned the _Summa_ of St. Thomas Aquinas by heart.[97] These occupations have left their trace on his next work, which was ready by 1572. Not only are Plutarch’s moral treatises perfectly consonant in tone with Amyot’s episcopal office, but the preface is touched with a breath of religious unction, of which his previous performances show no trace. Perhaps the flavour is a little too pronounced when in his grateful dedication to his royal master he declares: “The Lord has lodged in you singular goodness of nature.” The substantive needs all the help that can be wrung from the adjective, when used of Charles IX. in the year of St. Bartholomew. But Amyot, though the exhibiter of “Plutarch’s men,” was essentially a private student, and was besides bound by ties of intimacy and obligation to his former pupil, who had certainly done well by him. Nor was the younger brother behindhand in his acknowledgments. Charles died before two years were out (for Amyot had a way of dedicating books to kings who deceased soon after), and was lamented by Amyot in a simple and heartfelt Latin elegy. But his regrets were quite disinterested, for when Henry III. succeeded in 1574, he showed himself as kind a master, and in 1578 decreed that the Grand Almoner should also be Commander of the Order of the Holy Ghost without being required to give proofs of nobility.

[97] Twelve volumes!

Invested with ample revenues and manifold dignities, Amyot for the next eleven years lived a busy and simple life, varying the routine of his administrative duties with music, of which he was a lover and a practitioner; with translations, never published and now lost, from the Greek tragedians, who had attracted him as professor, and from St. Athanasius, who appealed to him as bishop; above all, with the revision of his Plutarch, for which he never ceased to collect new readings. Then came disasters, largely owing to his reputation for partiality and complaisance. When the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise were assassinated in 1589, he was accused by the Leaguers of having approved the crime and of having granted absolution to the King. This he denied; but his Chapter and diocesans rose against him, the populace sacked his residence, and he had to fly from Auxerre. Nor were his woes merely personal. On August 3rd the House of Valois, to which he was so much beholden, became extinct with the murder of Henry III.; and however worthless the victim may have been, Amyot cannot have been unaffected by old associations of familiarity and gratitude. Six days later he writes that he is “the most afflicted, desolate and destitute poor priest I suppose, in France.” His private distress was not of long duration. He made peace with the Leaguers, denounced the “politicians” for supporting Henry IV., returned to his see, resumed his episcopal duties, though he was divested of his Grand Almonership, and was able to leave the large fortune of two hundred thousand crowns. But he did not survive to see the establishment of the new dynasty or the triumph of Catholicism, for he died almost eighty years old in February, 1593, and only in the following June was Henry IV. reconciled to the Church. Perhaps had he foreseen this consummation Amyot would have found some comfort in the thought that a third pupil, a truer and greater one than those who were no more, would reign in their stead, and repair the damage their vice and folly had caused. “Glory to God!” writes Henry of Navarre to his wife, “you could have sent me no more pleasant message than the news of the zest for reading which has taken you. Plutarch always attracts me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me, for he was for long the instructor of my early years. My good mother, to whom I owe everything, and who had so great a desire to watch over my right attitude and was wont to say that she did not wish to see in her son a distinguished dunce, put this book in my hands when I was all but an infant at the breast. It has been, as it were, my conscience, and has prescribed in my ear many fair virtues and excellent maxims for my behaviour and for the management of my affairs.”[98]

[98] Vive Dieu! vous ne m’auriés sceu rien mander qui me fust plus agréable que la nouvelle du plaisir de lecture qui vous a prins. Plutarque me soubrit toujours d’une fresche nouveauté; l’aymer c’est m’aymer, car il a esté longtemps l’instituteur de mon bas age: ma bonne mère à laquelle je doibs tout, et qui avoit une affection si grande de veiller à mes bons deportmens, et ne vouloit pas (ce disoit-elle) voir en son filz un illustre ignorant, me mist ce livre entre les mains, encores que je ne feusse à peine plus un enfant de mamelle. Il m’a esté comme ma conscience et il m’a dicté à l’oreille beaucoup de bonnes honestetés et maximes excellentes pour ma conduite, et pour le gouvernment de mes affaires.

Amyot has exerted a far-reaching influence on the literature of his own country and of Europe. Though as a translator he might seem to have no more than a secondary claim, French historians of letters have dwelt on his work at a length and with a care that are usually conceded only to the achievements of creative imagination or intellectual discovery. And the reason is that his aptitude for his task amounts to real genius, which he has improved by assiduous research, so that in his treatment, the ancillary craft, as it is usually considered, rises to the rank of a free liberal art. He has the insight to divine what stimulus and information the age requires; the knowledge to command the sources that will supply them; the skill to manipulate his native idiom for the new demands, and suit his expression, so far as may be, both to his subject and to his audience. Among the great masters of translation he occupies a foremost place.

Of spontaneous and initiative power he had but little. He cannot stand alone. For Henry II. he wrote a _Projet de l’Eloquence Royal_, but it was not printed till long after his death; and of this and his other original prose his biographer, Roulliard, avows that the style is strangely cumbersome and laggard (_estrangement pesant et traisnassier_). Even in his prefaces to Plutarch he is only good when he catches fire from his enthusiasm for his author. Just as his misgivings at the Council of Trent, his commendations of his royal patrons, his concessions to his enemies of the League, suggest a defect in independent force of character, so the writings in which he must rely on himself show a defect in independent force of intellect.

Nor is he a specialist in scholarship. Already in 1635, when he had been less than a century in his grave, Bachet de Méziriac, expert in all departments of learning, exposed his shortcomings in a Discourse on Translation, which was delivered before the Academy. His critic describes him as “a promising pupil in rhetoric with a mediocre knowledge of Greek, and some slight tincture of Polite Letters”; and asserts that there are more than two thousand passages in which he has perverted the sense of his author. Even in 1580-81, during Amyot’s lifetime, Montaigne was forced to admit in discussion with certain learned men at Rome that he was less accurate than his admirers had imagined. He was certainly as far as possible from being a _Zunftgelehrter_. His peculiar attitude is exactly indicated by his treatment of the missing books of Diodorus which it was his good fortune to light upon. He is not specially interested in his discovery, and has no thought of giving the original documents to the world. At the same time he has such a reverence for antiquity that he must do something about them. So with an eye to his chosen constituency, his own countrymen, he executes his vernacular version.

For of his own countrymen he always thought first. They are his audience, and he has their needs in his mind. And that is why he made Plutarch the study of his life. His romances are mere experiments for his pastime and equipment:[99] his Diodorus is a task prescribed by accident and vocation: but his Plutarch is a labour of love and of patriotism. It was knowledge of antiquity for which the age clamoured and of which it stood in need; and who else could give such a summary and encyclopaedia of Classical Life as the polyhistor of Chaeronea, who interested himself in everything, from details of household management to the government of states, from ancestral superstitions to the speculations of philosophers, from after-dinner conversation to the direction of campaigns; but brought them all into vital relation with human nature and human conduct? Plutarch appealed to the popular instinct of the time and to the popular instinct in Amyot’s own breast. It is his large applicability “distill’d through all the needful uses of our lives” and “fit for any conference one can use” that, for example, arouses the enthusiasm of Montaigne. After mentioning that when he writes he willingly dispenses with the companionship or recollection of books, he adds:

[99] As he himself states in the _Proesme of Théagène et Chariclée_. He has occupied himself with this only, “aux heures extraordinaires, pour adoucir le travail d’autres meilleures et plus fructueuses traductions,” so as to be made “plus vif à la consideration des choses d’importance.”

But it is with more difficulty that I can get rid of
Plutarch: he is so universal and so full that on all
occasions and whatever out-of-the-way subject you have
taken up, he thrusts himself into your business, and holds
out to you a hand lavish and inexhaustible in treasures
and ornaments. I am vexed at his being so much exposed to
the plunder of those who resort to him. I can’t have the
slightest dealings with him myself, but I snatch a leg or
a wing.[100]

And again:

I am above all grateful to [Amyot] for having had the
insight to pick out and choose a book so worthy and so
seasonable, to make a present of it to his country. We
dunces should have been lost, if this book had not raised
us out of the mire. Thanks to it we now dare to speak and
write. With it the ladies can lecture the school-masters.
It is our breviary.[101]

[100] Je me puis plus malaysement desfaire de Plutarque; il est si universel et si plein, qu’à toutes occasions, et quelque subject extravagant que vous ayez prins, il s’ingère à vostre besongne, et vous tend une main liberale et inespuisable de richesses et d’embellissements. Il m’en faict despit, d’estre si fort exposé au pillage de ceulx qui le hantent: je ne le puis si peu raccointer, que je n’en tire cuisse ou aile (iii. 5).

[101] Mais, surtout, je lui sçais bon gré d’avoir sceu trier et choisir un livre si digne et si à propos, pour en faire présent à son pais. Nous aultres ignorants estions perdus, si ce livre ne nous eust relevé du bourbier: sa mercy nous osons à cette heure et parler et escrire; les dames en regentent les maistres d’eschole; c’est notre bresviaire (ii. 4).

“In all kinds Plutarch is my man,” he says elsewhere. And indeed it is obvious, even though he had not told us, that Plutarch with Seneca supplies his favourite reading, to which he perpetually recurs. “I have not,” he writes, “systematically acquainted myself with any solid books except Plutarch and Seneca, from whom I draw like the Danaides, filling and pouring out continually.”[102] To the latter he could go for himself; for the Greek he had to depend on Amyot. For combined profit and pleasure, he says, “the books that serve me are Plutarch, _since he is French_, and Seneca.”[103] But it is to the former that he seems to give the palm.

Seneca is full of smart and witty sayings, Plutarch of
things: the former kindles you more and excites you, the
latter satisfies you more and requites you better; he guides
us while the other drives us.[104]

[102] Je n’ay dressé commerce avecques aulcun livre solide sinon Plutarque et Senecque, où je puyse comme les Danaïdes remplissant et versant sans cesse (i. 25).

[103] Les livres qui m’y servent, c’est Plutarque depuis qu’il est françois, et Seneque (ii. iv.). Of course Montaigne knew some Greek and read it more or less. He has even his own opinion about Plutarch’s style (see page 104), and M. Faguet conjectures: “It is quite conceivable that Montaigne compared the translation with the text, and that it is a piece of mere affectation when he says he knows nothing of the Greek.” But doubtless he read the French much more habitually and easily.

[104] Seneque est plein de poinctes et saillies, Plutarque de choses; celuy là vous eschauffe plus et vous esmeut, cettuy ci vous contente davantage et vous paye mieulx; il nous guide, l’aultre nous poulse (ii. 10).

It is indeed impossible to imagine Montaigne without Plutarch, to whom he has a striking resemblance both in his free-and-easy homilies and in his pregnant touches. It is these things on which he dwells.

There are in Plutarch many dissertations at full length well
worth knowing, for in my opinion he is the master-craftsman
in that trade; but there are a thousand that he has merely
indicated; he only points out the track we are to take if we
like, and confines himself sometimes to touching the quick
of a subject. We must drag (the expositions) thence and put
them in the market place.... It is a dissertation in itself
to see him select a trivial act in the life of a man, or a
word that does not seem to have such import.[105]

[105] Il y a dans Plutarque beaucoup de discours estendus très dignes d’estre sceus, car, à mon gré, c’est le maistre ouvrier de telle besongne; mais il y en a mille qu’il n’a que touchez simplement; et guigne seulement du doigt par où nous irons, s’il nous plaist; et se contente quelquefois de ne donner qu’une attaincte dans le plus vif d’un propos. Il les fault arracher de la, et mettre en place marchande.... Cela mesme de luy voir trier une legere action en la vie d’un homme, ou un mot qui semble ne porter cela, c’est un discours (i. 25).

But Montaigne did not stand alone in his admiration. He himself, as we have seen, bears witness to the widespread popularity of Amyot’s Plutarch and the general practice of rifling its treasures. Indeed, Plutarch was seen to be so congenial to the age, that frequent attempts had been made before Amyot to place him within the reach of a larger circle than the little band of Greek scholars. In 1470, _e.g._ a number of Italians had co-operated in a Latin version of the _Lives_, published at Rome by Campani, and this was followed by several partial translations in French.[106] But the latter were immediately superseded, and even the former had its authority shaken, by Amyot’s achievement.

This was due partly to its greater intelligence and faithfulness, partly to its excellent style.

In regard to the first, it should be remembered that the criticism of Amyot’s learning must be very carefully qualified. Scholarship is a progressive science, and it is always easy for the successor to point out errors in the precursor, as Méziriac did in Amyot. Of course, however, the popular expositor was not a Budaeus or Scaliger, and the savants whom Montaigne met in Rome were doubtless justified in their strictures. Still the zeal that he showed and the trouble that he took in searching for good texts, in conferring them with the printed books and in consulting learned men about his conjectural emendations,[107] would suggest that he had the root of the matter in him, and there is evidence that expert opinion in his own days was favourable to his claims.[108]

[106] There were also translations in Italian, Spanish, and German; but none of them had anything like the literary importance of Amyot’s, and they were made from the Latin, not from the Greek. Of Hieronymus Boner, for instance, who published his _Plutarch, Von dem Leben der allerdurchlauchtigsten Griechen und Romern_ (1st edition, Augsburg, 1534), it is misleading to say that he “anticipated” Amyot. Merzdorf writes of Boner’s versions of Greek authors generally (_Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie_) that he “turned them into German not from the original Greek but from Latin translations. Moreover, one must not expect from him any exact rendering, but rather a kind of paraphrase which he accommodates to the circumstances of the time.”

[107] See his preface, towards the close.

[108] In later days, too, Mr. Holden, who has busied himself with Plutarch, says “Amyot’s version is more scholarlike and correct than those of Langhorne or Dryden and others.”

At the time when he was translating the _Lives_ into French two scholars of high reputation were, independently of each other, translating them into Latin. Xylander’s versions appeared in 1560, those of Cruserius were ready in the same year, but were not published till 1564. They still hold their place and enjoy consideration. Now, they both make their compliments to Amyot. Xylander, indeed, has only a second-hand acquaintance with his publication, but even that he has found valuable:

After I had already finished the greater part of the work,
the _Lives of Plutarch_ written by Amyot in the French
language made their appearance. And since I heard from
those who are skilled in that tongue, a privilege which I
do not possess, that he had devoted remarkable pains to the
book and used many good MSS., assisted by the courtesy of
friends, I corrected several passages about which I was in
doubt, and in not a few my conjecture was established by the
concurrence of that translator.[109]

[109] Cum jam majorem operis partem absolvissem, prodierunt Vitae Plutarchi gallicâ linguâ ab Amyoto conscriptae. Quem cum praeclaram ei libro operam impendisse ex iis qui linguae ejus sunt periti (quod mihi non datum est) et usum multis ac bonis codicibus audirem; amicorum adjutus ... officio, nonnullos, de quibus dubitabam, locos correxi; in haud paucis mea conjectura est illius interpretis suffragio comprobata (Ed. 1560). Xylander’s friends must have given him yeoman’s help, for he frequently discusses Amyot’s readings, generally adopting them; and for the whole life of Cato, he even goes so far as to avow: “Amyoti versionem secutus sum, Graecis non satis integris.”

Cruserius, again, in his prefatory _Epistle to the Reader_, warmly commends the merits of Xylander and Amyot, but refers with scarcely veiled disparagement to the older Latin rendering, which nevertheless enjoyed general acceptance as the number of editions proves, and was considered the standard authority.

If indeed (he writes) I must not here say that I by myself
have both more faithfully and more elegantly interpreted
_Plutarch’s Lives_, the translation of which into Latin
a great number of Italians formerly undertook without much
success; this at least I may say positively and justly that
I think I have done this.[110]

On the other hand “Amiotus” has been a help to him. When he had already polished and corrected his own version, he came across this very tasteful rendering in Brussels six months after it had appeared. “This man’s scholarship and industry gave me some light on several passages.”[111] It is well then to bear in mind, when Amyot’s competency is questioned, that by their own statement he cleared up things for specialists like Xylander and Cruserius. And this is all the more striking, that Cruserius, whom his preface shows to be very generous in his acknowledgments, has no word of recognition for his Italian predecessors even though Filelfo was among their number.[112] But his Epistle proceeds: “To whom (_i.e._ to Amyot) I will give this testimony that nowadays it is impossible that anyone should render Plutarch so elegantly in the Latin tongue, as he renders him in his own.”[113] And this praise of Amyot’s style leads us to the next point.

[110] Ego quidem si dicere hîc non valeam, vitas me Plutarchi, quas plurimi sumpserunt antehac Itali Latine reddendas parum feliciter, me explicavisse unum et verius et mundius; hoc certe dicere queo liquide et recte, esse arbitratum me hoc effecisse (_Epistola ad Lectorem_, 1561, edition 1599).

[111] Interea cum jam polivissem atque emendassem vitas meas Plutarchi, ostendit mihi Bruxellae, ubi agebam illustrissimi principis mei legatus, secretarius regius editas elegantissime ab Amioto linguâ gallicâ vitas Plutarchi, quae exierant tamen in publicum sex menses antequam eas viderem. Hujus viri mihi eruditio et diligentia aliquid lucis nonnullis in locis attulit. Cui ego hoc testimonium dabo: non posse fieri, ut quisquam hoc tempore Plutarchum tam vertat ornate linguâ Latina quam vertit ille suâ (_Ib._).

[112] Amyot’s own attitude is very similar. He cites the Latin versions in proof of the hardness of the original, and challenges a comparison of them with his own.

[113] Interea cum jam polivissem atque emendassem vitas meas Plutarchi, ostendit mihi Bruxellae, ubi agebam illustrissimi principis mei legatus, secretarius regius editas elegantissime ab Amioto linguâ gallicâ vitas Plutarchi, quae exierant tamen in publicum sex menses antequam eas viderem. Hujus viri mihi eruditio et diligentia aliquid lucis nonnullis in locis attulit. Cui ego hoc testimonium dabo: non posse fieri, ut quisquam hoc tempore Plutarchum tam vertat ornate linguâ Latina quam vertit ille suâ (_Ib._).

If Amyot claims the thanks of Western Europe for giving it with adequate faithfulness a typical miscellany of ancient life and thought, his services to his country in developing the native language are hardly less important. Before him Rabelais and Calvin were the only writers of first-rate ability in modern French. But Rabelais’ prose was too exuberant, heterogeneous and eccentric to supply a model; and Calvin, besides being suspect on account of his theology, was of necessity as a theologian abstract and restricted in his range. The new candidate had something of the wealth and universal appeal of the one, something of the correctness and purity of the other.

Since Plutarch deals with almost all departments of life, Amyot had need of the amplest vocabulary, and a supply of the most diverse locutions. Indeed, sometimes the copious resources of his vernacular, with which he had doubtless begun to familiarise himself among the simple folk of Melun, leave him in the lurch, and he has to make loans from Latin or Greek. But he does this sparingly, and only when no other course is open to him. Generally his thorough mastery of the dialect of the Île de France, the standard language of the kingdom, helps him out.

Yet he is far from adopting the popular speech without consciously manipulating it. He expressly states that he selects the fittest, sweetest, and most euphonious words, and such as are in the mouths of those who are accustomed to speak well. The ingenuousness of his utterance, which is in great measure due to his position of pioneer in a new period, should not mislead us into thinking him a careless writer. His habit of first composing his sermons in Latin and then translating them into French tells its own story. He evidently realised the superiority in precision and orderly arrangement of the speech of Rome, and felt it a benefit to submit to such discipline the artless _bonhomie_ of his mother tongue. But since he is the born interpreter, whose very business it was to mediate between the exotic and the indigenous, and assimilate the former to the latter, he never forgets the claims of his fellow Frenchmen and his native French. He does not force his idiom to imitate a foreign model, but only learns to develop its own possibilities of greater clearness, exactitude, and regularity.

It is for these excellencies among others, “pour la naifeté et purété du language en quoi il surpasse touts aultres,”[114] that Montaigne gives him the palm, and this purity served him in good stead during the classical period of French literature, which was so unjust to most writers of the sixteenth century, and found fault with Montaigne himself for his “Gasconisms.” Racine thought that Amyot’s “old style” had a grace which could not be equalled in our modern language. Fénelon regretfully looks back to him for beauties that are fallen into disuse. Nor was it only men of delicate and poetic genius who appreciated his merits. Vaugelas, the somewhat illiberal grammarian and purist, is the most enthusiastic of the worshippers.

What obligation (he exclaims) does our language not owe to
him, there never having been anyone who knew its genius and
character better than he, or who used words and phrases
so genuinely French without admixture of the provincial
expressions which daily corrupt the purity of the true
French tongue. All stores and treasures are in the works of
this great man. And even to-day we have hardly any noble and
splendid modes of speech that he has not left us; and though
we have cut out a half of his words and phrases, we do not
fail to find in the other half almost all the riches of
which we boast.

[114] ii. 4.

It will be seen, however, that in such tributes from the seventeenth century (and the same thing is true of others left unquoted), it is implied that Amyot is already somewhat antiquated and out of fashion. He is honoured as ancestor in the right line of classical French, but he is its ancestor and not a living representative. Vaugelas admits that half his vocabulary is obsolete, Fénelon regrets his charms just because their date is past, Racine wonders that such grace should have been attained in what is not the modern language.

And this may remind us of the very important fact, that Amyot could not on account of his position deliver a facsimile of the Greek. Plutarch lived at the close of an epoch, he at the beginning. The one employed a language full of reminiscences and past its prime; the other, a language that was just reaching self-consciousness and that had the future before it. Both in a way were artists, but Plutarch shows his art in setting his stones already cut, while Amyot provides moulds for the liquid metal. At their worst Plutarch’s style becomes mannered and Amyot’s infantile. By no sleight of hand would it have been possible to give in the French of the sixteenth century an exact reproduction of the Greek of the second. Grey-haired antiquity had to learn the accents of stammering childhood.

Sometimes Amyot hardly makes an attempt at literal fidelity. The style of his original he describes as “plein, serré et philosophistorique.” With him it retains the fulness, but the condensation, or rather what a modern scholar describes as “the crowding of the sentence,”[115] often gives place to periphrasis, and of the “philosophistorique” small trace remains. Montaigne praises him because he has contrived “to expound so thorny and crabbed[116] an author with such fidelity.” What is most crabbed and thorny in Plutarch he passes over or replaces with a loose equivalent; single words he expands to phrases; difficulties he explains with a gloss or illustration that he does not hesitate to insert in the text; and he is anxious to bring out the sense by adding more emphatic and often familiar touches.

[115] Mr. Holden.

[116] Espineux et ferré (ii. iv.). Perhaps _ferré_ should be rendered _difficult_ rather than _crabbed_. But even _thorny and difficult_ are hardly words that one would apply to Plutarch. Montaigne’s meaning may perhaps be illustrated by the criticism of Paley: “Plutarch’s Greek is not like Lucian’s, fluent and easy, nor even clear.” He uses many words not in the ordinary Greek vocabulary; and he too often constructs long sentences, the thread of which separately as well as the connection cannot be traced without close attention. Hence he is unattractive as a writer.

The result of it all undoubtedly is to lend Plutarch a more popular and less academic bearing than he really has. Some of Amyot’s most attractive effects either do not exist or are inconspicuous in his original. The tendency to artifice and rhetoric in the pupil of Ammonius disappears, and he is apt to get the credit for an innocence and freshness that are more characteristic of his translator. M. Faguet justly points out that Amyot in his version makes Plutarch “a simple writer, while he was elegant, fastidious, and even affected in his style.” ... He “emerges from Amyot’s hands as _le bon Plutarque_ of the French people, whereas he was certainly not that.” Thus it is beyond dispute that the impression produced is in some respects misleading.

But there is another side to this. Plutarch in his tastes and ideals did belong to an older, less sophisticated age, though he was born out of due time and had to adapt his speech to his hyper-civilised environment. Ampère has called attention to the picture, suggested by the facts at our disposal, of Plutarch living in his little Boeotian town, obtaining his initiation into the mysteries, punctually fulfilling the functions of priest, making antiquities and traditions his hobby. “There was this man under the rhetorician,” he adds, “and we must not forget it. For if the rhetorician wrote, it was the other Plutarch who often dictated.” Of course in a way the antithesis is an unreal one. Plutarch was after all, as every one must be, the child of his own generation, and his aspirations were not confined to himself. The _Sophistes_ is, on the one hand, what the man who makes antiquity and traditions his hobby, is on the other. Still it remains certain that his love was set on things which pertained to an earlier and less elaborate phase of society, to “the good old days” when they found spontaneous acceptance and expression. On him the ends of the world are come, and he seeks by all the resources of his art and learning to revive what he regards as its glorious prime. His heart is with the men “of heart, head, hand,” but when he seeks to reveal them, he must do so in the chequered light of a vari-coloured culture.

Hence there was a kind of discrepancy between his spirit and his utterance; and Amyot, removing the discrepancy, brings them into a natural harmony. There is truth in the paradox that the form which the good bishop supplies is the one that was meant for the matter. “Amyot,” says Demogeot, summing up his discussion of this aspect of the question, “has in some sort created Plutarch, and made him truer and more complete than nature made him.”

But though Plutarch’s ideas seem from one point of view to enter into their predestined habitation, this does not alter the fact that they lose something of their distinctive character in accommodating themselves to their new surroundings. It is easy to exaggerate their affinity with the vernacular words, as it is easy to exaggerate the correspondence between author and translator. Thus Ampère, half in jest, pleases himself with drawing on behalf of the two men a parallel such as is appended to each particular brace of _Lives_. Both of them lovers of virtue, he points out, for example, that both had a veneration for the past, of which the one strove to preserve the memories even then beginning to fade, and the other to rediscover and gather up the shattered fragments. Both experienced sad and troublous times without having their tranquillity disturbed, the one by the crimes of Domitian or the other by the furies of St. Bartholomew’s. Both belonged to the hierarchy, the one as priest of Apollo, the other as Bishop of Auxerre.

But it is not hard to turn such parallels into so many contrasts. The past with which Plutarch was busy was in a manner the familiar past of his native country or at least of his own civilisation; but Amyot loved the past of that remote and alien world in which for ages men had neglected their heritage and taken small concern. The sequestered life of the provincial under the Roman Empire, a privacy whence he emerges to whatever civil offices were within his reach, is very different from the dislike and refusal of public activity that characterises the Frenchman in his own land at a time when learning was recognised as passport to high position in the State. The priest of a heathen cult which he could accept only when explained away by a rationalistic idealism, and which was by no means incompatible with his family instincts, was very different from the celibate churchman who ended by submitting to the terms imposed by the intolerance of the Holy League. The analogies are there, and imply perhaps a strain of intellectual kinship, but the contrasts are not less obvious, and refute the idea of a perfect unison.

Now, it is much the same if we turn from the writers to their writings. All translation is a compromise between the foreign material and the native intelligence, but in Amyot the latter factor counts most. Classical life is very completely assimilated to the contemporary life that he knew, but such contemporary life was in some ways quite unlike that which he was reproducing. There is an illusory sameness in the effects produced as there is an illusion of coincidence in the characters and careers of the men who produce them, and this may have its cause in real contact at certain points. But the gaps that separate them are also real, though at the time they were seldom detected. “Both by the details and the general tone of his version,” says M. Lanson, “[Amyot] modernises the Graeco-Roman world, and by this involuntary travesty he tends to check the awakening of the sense for the differences, that is, the historic sense. As he invites Shakespeare to recognise the English _Mob_ in the _Plebs Romana_, so he authorises Corneille and Racine and even Mademoiselle Scudéry to portray under ancient names the human nature they saw in France.”

And this tendency was carried further in Amyot’s English translator.

3. NORTH

Of Sir Thomas North, the most recent and direct of the authorities who transmitted to Shakespeare his classical material, much less is known than of either of his predecessors. Plutarch, partly because as original author he has the opportunity of expressing his own personality, partly because he uses this opportunity to the full in frank advocacy of his views and gossip about himself, may be pictured with fair vividness and in some detail. Such information fails in regard to Amyot, since he was above all the mouthpiece for other men; but his high dignities placed him in the gaze of contemporaries, and his reputation as pioneer in classical translation and nursing-father of modern French ensured a certain interest in his career. But North, like him a translator, had not equal prominence either from his position or from his achievement. Such honours and appointments as he obtained were not of the kind to attract regard. He was a mere unit in the Elizabethan crowd of literary importers, and belonged to the lower class who never steered their course “to the classic coast.” He had no such share as Amyot in shaping the traditions of the language, but was one writer in an age that produced many others, some of them greater masters than he. Yet to us, as the immediate interpreter of Plutarch to Shakespeare, he is the most important of the three, the most famous and the most alive. Sainte Beuve, talking of Amyot, quotes a phrase from Leopardi in reference to the Italians who have associated themselves forever with the Classics they unveiled: “Oh, how fair a fate! to be exempt from death except in company with an Immortal!” This fair fate is North’s in double portion. He is linked with a great Immortal by descent, and with a greater by ancestry.

Thomas North, second son of the first Baron North of Kirtling, was born about 1535, to live his life, as it would seem, in straitened circumstances and unassuming work. Yet we might have anticipated for him a prosperous and eminent career. He had high connections and powerful patrons; his father made provision for him, his brother helped him once and again, a royal favourite interested himself on his behalf. His ability and industry are evident from his works; his honesty and courage are vouched for by those in a position to know; the efficiency of his public services received recognition from his fellow-citizens and his sovereign. But with all these advantages and qualifications he was even in middle age hampered by lack of means, and he never had much share in the pelf and pomp of life. Perhaps his occupation with larger concerns than personal aggrandisement may have interfered with his material success. At any rate, in his narrower sphere he showed himself a man of public interest and public spirit, and the authors with whom he busies himself are all such as commend ideal rather than tangible possessions as the real objects of desire. And we know besides that he was an unaggressive man, inclined to claim less than his due; for in one of his books he professes to get the material only from a French translation, when it is proved that he must have had recourse to the Spanish original as well.

This was his maiden effort, _The Diall of Princes_, published in 1557, when North was barely of age and had just been entered a student of Lincoln’s Inn; and with this year the vague and scanty data for his history really begin. He dedicates his book to Queen Mary, who had shown favour to his father, pardoning him for his support of Lady Jane Grey, raising him to the peerage, and distinguishing him in other ways. But on the death of Mary, Lord North retained the goodwill of Elizabeth, who twice kept her court at his mansion, and appointed him Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. The family had thus considerable local influence, and it was not diminished when, on the old man’s death in 1564, Roger, the first son, succeeded to the title. Before long the new Lord North was made successively an alderman of Cambridge, Lord Lieutenant of the County, and High Steward; while Thomas, who had benefited under his father’s will, was presented to the freedom of the town. All through, the career of the junior appears as a sort of humble pendant to that of the senior, and he picks up his dole of the largesses that Fortune showers on the head of the house. What he had been doing in the intervening years we do not know, but he cannot have abandoned his literary pursuits, for in 1568, when he received this civic courtesy, he issued a new edition of the _Diall_, corrected and enlarged; and he followed it up in 1570 with a version of Doni’s _Morale Filosofia_.

Meanwhile the elder brother was advancing on his brilliant course. He had been sent to Vienna to invest the Emperor Maximilian with the Order of the Garter; he had been commissioned to present the Queen on his return with the portrait of her suitor, the Archduke Charles; he had held various offices at home, and in 1574 he was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to congratulate Henry III. of France on his accession, and to procure if possible toleration for the Huguenots and a renewal of the Treaty of Blois. On this important legation he was accompanied by Thomas, who would thus have an opportunity of seeing or hearing something of Amyot, the great Bishop and Grand Almoner who was soon to be recipient of new honours from his royal pupil and patron, and who had recently been drawing new attention on himself by his third edition of the _Lives_ and his first edition of the _Morals_.[117] It may well be that this visit suggested to Thomas North his own masterpiece, which he seems to have set about soon after he came home in the end of November. At least it was to appear in January, 1579, before another lustre was out; and a translation even from French of the entire _Lives_, not only unabridged but augmented (for biographies of Hannibal and Scipio are added from the versions of Charles de l’Escluse),[118] is a task of years rather than of months.

[117] I do not know what authority Mr. Wyndham has for his statement that Amyot’s version of the _Morals_ “fell comparatively dead.” It is, of course, much less read nowadays, but at the time it ran through three editions in less than four years (1572, 1574, 1575), and for the next half century there are frequent reprints.

[118] These, translated from the Latin collection of 1470, to which they had been contributed by Acciaiuoli, were included in Amyot’s third edition.

The embassage, despite many difficulties to be overcome, had been a success, and Lord North returned to receive the thanks and favours he deserved. He stood high in the Queen’s regard, and in 1578 she honoured him with a visit for a night. He was lavish in his welcome, building, we are told, new kitchens for the occasion; filling them with provisions of all kinds, the oysters alone amounting to one cart load and two horse loads; rifling the cellars of their stores, seventy-four hogsheads of beer being reinforced with corresponding supplies of ale, claret, white wine, sack, and hippocras; presenting her at her departure with a jewel worth £120 in the money of the time. In such magnificent doings he was by no means unmindful of his brother, to whom shortly before he had made over the lease of a house and household stuff. Yet precisely at this date, when Thomas North was completing or had completed his first edition of the _Lives_, his circumstances seem to have been specially embarrassed. Soon after the book appeared Leicester writes on his behalf to Burleigh, stating that he “is a very honest gentleman and hath many good parts in him which are drowned only by poverty.” There is perhaps a certain incongruity between these words and the accounts of the profusion at Kirtling in the preceding year.

Meanwhile Lord North, to his reputation as diplomatist and courtier sought to add that of a soldier. In the Low Countries he greatly distinguished himself by his capacity and courage; but he was called home to look after the defences of the eastern coast in view of the expected Spanish invasion, and this was not the only time that the Government resorted to him for military advice.